Presenter: Keaton Kell
Mentor: Galen Martin
Oral Presentation
Major: International Studies/Romance
The Rwandan genocide tends to be seen as the product of an isolated racial conflict that happened too quickly and too suddenly for anyone to do anything about it: however, much research shows that the violence occurring in Rwanda was well known. Because of this knowledge and the power of powerful nations in the UN, inaction is sometimes equated with culpability. More concretely, the Rwandan Mucyo report, among others, names France as culpable in the Rwandan genocide. By examining UN convention on Genocide, French commissions on the genocide from l’Assemblée Nationale, and documentaries and news from France and Rwanda, I demonstrate the relative innocence of the United States and Belgium, and the murky and possible culpability of France. The hope of this research is less an effort to render certain powerful nations vulnerable to the international criminal court, and more to push individuals to question where the bounds of culpability lie and to what moral standards should apply to the United Nations, and how the United Nations, and citizens of countries in the United Nations, should respond when they fail to uphold those standards and protect humanity from the repetition of genocide as the international community failed to do in Rwanda, and is failing currently to do in the Central African Republic.